Grassroot has a Mac and internet access and lives in the hills of Mendocino County. She wants to make a difference, and wakes up one day deciding to help save Headwaters forest.
First she needs to get some background on the issue, so she goes to the MEC web site and looks under the "Headwaters" topic in the Index by Topic for the newsletter. A friend had told her that the MEC site currently has an across-issue index, organized by topic, for the last dozen issues of the newsletter.
She reads several past newsletter articles and feels like she now has an overview of Headwaters and what activists have been doing in the woods over the last couple of years. She decides to jump right in. She heads up to base camp, takes non-violence training, and spends a couple of weeks cooking, doing actions in the woods, and sitting in on organizing meetings. She gets to know other activists, and appreciates their energy and especially their commitment to non-violence and saving Headwaters.
The MEC asks her to write an article for the next newsletter. She spends a few days writing the article on her computer, occasionally e-mailing questions to some of her new friends up north, asking for specific details of actions they have done. She finishes the article one night at 2 am, and sends it to the MEC as an attached document, along with a photo that she scanned on a friend's computer the day before. The MEC finds the article in the In Box next morning. It is edited and then sent back for final approval. Grassroot returns the file with a few minor changes and it's ready for layout.
One night, Grassroot wakes up at 5 am in a cold sweat, having just had a nightmare about a marbled murrelet arguing for its life before a jury of loggers, who are all seem very puzzled that they came to be in this courtroom.
The dream gets Grassroot curious about the legal battles EPIC (Environmental Protection and Information Center) has fought to save the murrelet. She can't get back to sleep so she makes a cup of coffee, goes online to the MEC web site, jumps to the Headwaters area, finds the EPIC web site and is enthralled until dawn reading about the great work EPIC has done in court over the last few years.
As the sun peaks over the hills, she starts thinking about her brother who is working in New Zealand as a botanist. She copies parts of what she has been reading from the web, annotates it with some comments about her own growing knowledge of diminishing habitat, and e-mails it off to him. It's been great over the last year to keep more in contact with her older brother using the net.
Now that she is getting more and more interested and involved in the organizing end of Headwaters, she asks to subscribe to the Headwaters listserv. New subscriptions to this listserve are monitored because this is a private on-line discussion group. She is invited in, and now she has access to the very latest ideas, current strategizing, planning for actions, legal updates, etc. as they are being discussed by the main players involved in the Headwaters effort, wherever they happen to live.
The way a listserv works is that whenever anyone on the list sends an e-mail, everyone gets it. It is also possible to get a listserv in digest form, with an entire days or weeks worth of e-mails gathered together into one e-mail.
One day she hears about an interesting program on radio station KMUD in Garberville, but unfortunately she can't get that station on her radio out in the hills. She mentions this to her neighbor. No problem! He shows her how to download an audio/video internet tool called RealPlayer and connect to the net with a program called MacTuner, which lists radio and TV stations offering live broadcasts (called livecasts) around the world She finds KMUD's live feed over the net, listens to the program and also connects her computer to her music system so she can tape the program for a friend.
A few weeks later she hears there is a benefit concert somewhere on the coast where one of her favorite singers, Alicia Littletree, will be performing. But where and when is it? She goes to the MEC web site to the Calendar of Events page, and finds out the event is that very night! She heads to the coast and has a great time.
She feels very strongly about Headwaters and wants to get the word out to the world about the effort to preserve the last stands of ancient redwood, so she writes some stories about the non-violent actions she has done in Headwaters and posts them to the alt.activism newsgroup.
Newsgroups are a many to many communication tool on the net whereas e-mail is a one to one tool, and listservs are a one to many tool. Newsgroup are an area of the internet devoted to specific topics. You can read what other people have written, and respond to specific postings or add your own to the pool of messages.
A few days later, she gets several messages back from different parts of the world, with one message that particularly strikes her. A woman named Anne in Canada is involved in a similar effort to preserve ancient forests there. Anne shares her own commitment to activism and her dreams of a sustainable earth. Grassroot likes the passionate way in which Anne expresses herself, and they start up an e-mail correspondence, sharing weekly their personal feelings around working for something greater than themselves and longer than their life span. Someday, she thinks, she will have to meet Anne in person.
Grassroots sits in her sunny window seat one morning reflecting on how valuable the Internet and the MEC web site have been for her budding environmental activism. And how great a tool the internet is for keeping informed and connected with people wherever they are in the world.
She is looking forward to the evening when she and her brother and her parents will set up a live chat. Chat is an internet environment where live "e-mail" communication can take place. They will set up their own private chat "room." With her brother far away in New Zealand and her parents back east, its going to be nice to have a little family get together.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1999
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited